I do not wish to convey that the conversation of the newly married pair was entirely egotistical. Before a single hour had passed Caroline herself broached a new subject. «Humphrey, dear,» she said, «we hear you've become famous. Is it true?»
«It's true if you've heard it,» he replied. «That's what fame is.»
«But is it true about eternal youth and all that?»
«My dear girl,» said he, «I think you've got all the scientists beaten as far as eternal youth is concerned. You looked eighteen when I met you, and you were twenty-three. Now you're twenty-six …»
«Twenty-seven last week, Humphrey.»
«And you still look eighteen.»
«But I shan't always.»
«I can't say I've noticed myself slowing up any,» said Brodie. «But some of these youngsters from the West Coast …» He shook his head with the melancholy always induced in tennis players by a mention of the West Coast.
Humphrey ignored this interjection. His eyes were fixed on Caroline. «Of course you won't be young always,» said he. «I imagine you'd hardly want to. Those people you see around, who never seem to mature, they belong to a particular frigid, inhibited, narcissistic type — they're in love with themselves; they can't love anyone else; therefore they don't really live; therefore they don't get any older.»
«Yes, yes. But this stuff you've discovered… ?»
«Oh!» said Humphrey. And smiling, he shook his head.
«It's not true then?» cried Caroline. Her disappointment would have moved a heart of stone.
«I told you it was all a lot of hooey,» said Brodie.
«These journalists always omit to mention the snags,» said Humphrey.
«And they wrote as if you'd really truly discovered it,» lamented Caroline.
«It's completely untrue,» said Humphrey. «It was Vingleberg, almost entirely.»
«You mean it has been found,» said Caroline, her face lighting up again.
«I didn't say so, to the newspaper men,» said Humphrey. «However, they chose to take it that way.» His tone suddenly became very cold and hard. «Now I want both of you to understand this. This is something no one in the world must know about.»
«Oh, yes! Yes!»
«Do you understand that, Brodie?»
«You can rely on me.»
«Very well,» said Humphrey. He sat very still for a moment, as if conquering some final reluctance. Then he rose abruptly and went out of the room.
Caroline and Alan didn't even glance at each other. They sat there looking at the door through which Humphrey had disappeared, expecting him to return with a crucible or an alembic at the very least. Instead, he came back almost immediately, dangling a piece of very ordinary string.
He smiled at his guests. He gave the string a jerk or two, and in through the door, leaping, frisking, clapping its paws in hot pursuit, came a kitten. Humphrey enticed it right over to where Caroline was sitting, made it jump once or twice. Then he picked it up and handed it to her.
«It's sweet,» said Caroline. «But …»
«It had a birthday last week,» said Humphrey. «Five years old.»
Caroline dropped the kitten as if it were hot. «I hope people will be able to overcome that sort of instinctive prejudice,» said Humphrey, picking it up again and handing it back to her. «Before very long the world will have to get used to this sort of thing.»
«But, Humphrey,» said Caroline, quite agitated, «it's a dwarf or a midget or something.»
«I assure you,» said Humphrey, «that kitten is as normal as any kitten you've ever seen in your life.»
«But what will happen to it? Will it go on forever?» And, as Humphrey shook his head: «Will it go off bang, or crumble into dust or something?»
«Almost surely heart failure,» said Humphrey. «But only after forty years of glorious youth. That's two hundred for a human being. But remember this, both of you …» He paused impressively.
«Yes? Yes?»
«I went to Vienna,» said Humphrey very slowly and clearly, «exactly three years and four months ago. This kitten is five years old. So you see it's Vingleberg's discovery.»
«Oh, yes. Yes, of course. But they said in the papers it was human beings,» said Caroline.
«I was helping Vingleberg adapt it to human beings.»
«And you succeeded?»
«Remember you have promised not to mention this to a living soul. Yes, we succeeded. To a limited extent, that is.»
Alan spoke in a voice at once impatient and businesslike. «Mr. Baxter, you said before very long the world …»
«Humphrey,» said Humphrey with a friendly smile.
«Yes — Humphrey. But … but when?»
«It's a question of finding a new source for the extract,» said Humphrey. «Or possibly making it synthetically, though I doubt we'll ever do that. I should say thirty years. With luck — twenty.»
«Ah!» said Caroline. «I thought you meant now.»
«To get this stuff,» cried Humphrey, «we have to perform an extremely delicate operation, which unfortunately is fatal to the animal we get it from. So it's terribly difficult.»
«What animal?» asked Alan.
«It's quite a common one,» said Humphrey. «Man.»
«Oh!»
«I think we've discovered another source, but it'll take years to test, and more years to manufacture an adequate supply. That's the point. That's why I swore you to secrecy. All merry hell would break loose on this planet if people knew there was just some in existence, being kept for the privileged few.»
«There is some then?» said Caroline.
«The extract has been made,» said Humphrey, «in very odd circumstances, about which I'll tell you exactly nothing — it has been made three times.»
«Three!» exclaimed Alan, as if impressed by the coincidence, because there were three people right there in the room.
«I took one,» said Humphrey with a smile.
«And the others?» cried Caroline.
«Fortunately one dose is enough,» continued Humphrey. «I don't want to bore you with technicalities, but this is extremely interesting. This secretion actually changes the functions of two distinct glands, neither of them the gland from which we originally extracted it. Now …»
«But, Humphrey dear, what happened to the other two doses?»
«Vingleberg took one of them. He's sixty-eight and as ugly as a monkey. He'll stay sixty-eight, and stay ugly, for the next two hundred years.»
«For God's sake!» said Alan bitterly.
«And the third?» asked Caroline.
«Caroline, my dear,» said Humphrey, «I brought that back with me. I needn't tell you why.» As he spoke he unlocked a little drawer in his desk. «Here it is,» he said, holding an ordinary phial full of a colourless liquid. «Life, youth, love, for nearly two hundred years! Probably more, because in that time we'll have found out all sorts of things. I nearly poured this away, the day I landed.»
«Oh, Humphrey, I … what can I say?»
«I don't feel that way any longer,» said Humphrey. «In fact, I didn't from the very first moment I met you both. So I'd like you to have this, if you'd care for it. Call it a sort of belated wedding present. Here you are. To both of you.»
He held out the phial and, finding two hands extended to receive it, he brought them together. «But you do solemnly swear never to say a word?» he asked.